5 thoughts on ““The Artificial Bees” by Simon Guerrier”

I don’t feel like we have enough to tell.
It’s va very quick piece, and Randall is really only here as an observer. We don’t get much of a non-human mindset, just old things that have frown unfamiliar.
And on the other hand, she has a desire ti help the man; she has an understanding of his self-denial; she feels the garden is "nice." She even goes out of her way to differentiate "real" from "organic" – which (A) implies that *she* feels herself to be "real," and (B) feels like an awfully human thing to do 😛

It’s a short, quick piece. What I enjoyed most about it was Randall’s unfamiliarity with, well, everything.

I’m a little bothered by the way Randall starts out all purposeful — "Proceed with operation" — but then it seems like she’s just there to hang out and observe. Once the full situation is revealed, there hasn’t actually been much story; only exposition.

I like the artificial bees too, and I guess they are the heart of the piece. The idea of wanting to recreate bees artificially, even to the pointlessly harmful level of stinging people… there’s something to that. I like.

Absolutely! there’s so much to be said about what is "real" versus "authentic".

The robots who made this little garden treasured things that weren’t manufactured. They wanted to recreate organic life as closely as possible. And they, themselves, had been made by humans before human extinction — probably these desires were a legacy from the designers of the first robots. I would think so.

If it was possible to program desires into robots, then I’m pretty sure that care for organic life is one that people would want to implant.

The humans who left this legacy, and the robots who followed them, thought that the most important part was for things to *feel* authentic. They made the man so realistic that he actually gets lonely. That’s kind of a cruelty.

Do you think it is really better for the creations to not realize they’re created, and if so, why?